Sunday, March 30, 2014

What if you were notified, either by facebook or by your cellphone company, that you were going to have to pay if you want to use your account on The Social Network. Oh and by the way, if your account is inactive more than 30 days it may be deleted and anyone else could come along and open a new account using your old facebook url.

Did you know that people in some developing nations, poor as they may be, are forced to pay to use facebook? That's like using small children to make clothes for Americans. It's not right!

Sunday, March 9, 2014

Hey guys it’s Ileane from BasicBlogTips.com and today we’re going to continue our series aboutgetting more views on YouTube using Annotations. If you didn’t see the first video – we talked about InVideo programming.

Now today we’re going to get into putting annotations on individual videos.

There’s a few benefits of adding annotations to videos so let’s go over those real quickly:

One would be to get more subscribers on your channel

The other would be to get people to watch more of your videos- you know YouTube likes when we keep people on YouTube – so if you have videos that are related, you want to get people to check out the other videos on your channel

And more importantly for bloggers and website owners we want to get people to come back to our website

So let’s see how we can set up annotations to do those three things.

Go into your Video Manager and next to each one of your videos you’ll see “Edit” and you can add your annotations that way.

Another way we can access the annotations is right from the watch page of a specific video and the annotations are indicated by this little icon right here.

Here’s an example of an annotation that I set up on this video.

I put an overlay of the cover of this YouTube Report I did and when people click that link they go to a page where I have a sign up form for people to get the report and sign up for my email list. And come to think of it, by the way, if you want that report just go tohttp://basicblogtips.com/getyoutubereport

Now let’s go into YouTube and setup an annotation

The annotations interface is pretty simple. You come over here if you wanna add an annotation.Here’s the different options you have:

Speech Bubble

Note

Title

Spotlight and

Label

Most of the time you’re going to want to use one of these that will link back to something. So I recommend thespotlight or the note, but you can experiment with all these to see which ones work best with your video and your content

Let’s keep it simple and add a note.

Now what you’ll see here is the timeline and this is the indication for where you want to place the annotation in video. Keep in mindas I showed you in the previous video about InVideo programming you don’t wanna have too many calls to action at one specific spot in the video. Since I know that my InVideo programming is in the last 30 seconds of the video then I wanna keep any other annotations towards the beginning or the middle of the video.

So you’ll type in your message – you have choice of four different font sizes - the color of the text – and I would always just try to make it contrasting. It could be black or white but remember to not use black text on a black background or white on a white so use any of these other contrasting colors that will make the annotation standout then once you’ve done that this is where you get the choice to link to:

A video

One of your video playlists (that’s also an excellent idea)

Your YouTube channel

You can also link to your Google+ profile

Get people to subscribe to your channel

If you have a fundraising project or

An associate website – and also

Merchandise

In this case we’re going to link to an Associated website and just so you know, the “Association” has to be set up in your YouTube settings before you can use your website link.In my case I already have my blog “Basic Blog Tips” setup as my associated website. Real quickly – In order to

Get That Associated Website

Go into your channel settings under the Advanced tab – Associated Website is right here. You add in your name of your website and then you’ll get success – it will give you an option to approve that.

Once you’ve had annotations in place on a few videos, give it a few weeks, and then come over to your analytics. Go down to annotations – of course this is in beta - and see how your annotations are performing. For ones that are doing well for you like I mentioned before – the spotlight and the notes do well for me so therefore I go back and I add more of those.

But you just continue to test until you find out the ones that are helping you reach your goals. That’s it for today and I wanna see you succeed on YouTube. Please subscribe to my channel and keep following me for all these tips I have lots of them on my website as well and I’ll see you in the next video…

Wrapping Up the YouTube Annotations Series

I hope you enjoyed part 1 and part 2 of the series on creating annotations for your YouTube videos. I plan to bring you more tips and strategies that will help you use video marketing to get more traffic and subscribers. Effective use of video can help you quickly increase your authority no matter which niche you’re in. In the meanwhile, take your time and go through all of the YouTube related posts and tutorials on this blog by clicking the YouTube link in the menu bar at the top of the page.

One more tip: I use a combination of LeadPages and Pretty Link Pro to create the sign up form and the clickable Call to Action link that I use for the annotation example during this YouTube video. Stay tuned for more information about those two tools to grow your email list, promote your YouTube videos and more in future blog posts. Those are my affiliate links and if you use them I’ll earn a commission but it doesn’t effect the price that you pay.

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

For those unfamiliar with the service, Pinterest is a visual discovery tool that people use to collect ideas for their different projects and interests. People create and share collections (called “boards”) of visual bookmarks (called “Pins”) that they use to do things like plan trips and projects, organize events or save articles and recipes. Pinterest allows users to save images and categorize them on different boards. They can follow other users' boards if they have similar tastes. The most popular categories include arts and crafts, home, style and fashion, and (of course) food!

A "board" is where the user's pins are located; users can have several boards for various items. A "pin" is an image that has either been uploaded or linked from a website. Once users create boards and add pins, other users can now "repin", meaning that they can "pin" one user's image to their board as well. Happy Pinning!